Monthly Archives: July 2013

Every year about this time I go back to listening to classical music, specifically Romantic-era chamber music: Middle and late Beethoven quartets and string trios, Brahms and Schubert quartets and quintets, etc. So I’ve been saving this poem for this time of year since I saw it on The Writer’s Almanac earlier. “Sad and lavish in their tenderness” gets me every time, because it’s so true of so much Romantic music. (You can listen to the Brahms Intermezzi the poem talks about right here.)

Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.

I’ve been moving things around and putting up more pictures (and going to IKEA three times) instead of sewing this last week. When I was sewing lately, I would look around and think, “This room feels temporary.” Granted, it’s a workspace, but there was an odd collection of storage and too much blank wall space.

So I moved the mirror in the bedroom into the sewing room and put it on a blank wall, and framed up some fabric and a Maxfield Parrish postcard and it’s much improved.

Here’s the before (with all the in-progress projects, too):

And here’s the after, with some “styling” done

Moving that bedroom mirror has started a whole “if you give a mouse a cookie” string of events, though….because I had to replace the bedroom mirror with something, and that turned out to be the mirror in the hall bath, which needed a new mirror, and then the bedroom needed some art around its new mirror and so did the bathroom, and I think maybe the sewing room needs some more coordinated storage along the other wall, and why not get a new desk chair for the office while I’m at it?

So that’s why I haven’t been sewing. But I will enjoy the room more when I get back into it.

1. Yesterday’s “Monday” was as bad as yesterday’s gif–but look, it’s Friday already! And I get to dress up and make artichoke dip for a birthday party this weekend, and maybe even do some home improvements. I love my 30s.

2. This could be my inner monologue any time I wear a blazer or a dress with pockets:

I took Monday and Tuesday off this week and had Wednesday off for a state holiday–so today is my first day back at work in nearly a week. I think this gif sums up how quickly the time passed. Let’s just hope re-entry isn’t that rough:

I brought car knitting on the camping trip but I also brought a friendship bracelet to work on just sitting around camp. I finished it while we watched large raptors (“lake eagles”) and some sort of jay enjoy the afternoon. (Unrelated, I need a bird identification guide.)

Back at home, I can stack it with another bracelet I made last year (and added rhinestones to this year).
However, I think I need to give any more I make to, you know, friends, since there’s a line in my head: Two friendship bracelets are fashion-y; three friendship bracelets will have people telling you how to get to the drum circle.

I spent the weekend camping in the Uinta Mountains about four hours north of the city. It was a lovely break with like-minded friends and lots of lakes.

There were high lakes:

And not-quite lakes:

And lakes with lilies (!):

And calm lakes at sunset where you could see fish jump:

There were also wildflower meadows:

And camp fashion:

And camp cocktails:

It was a good trip. When I bought a “real” sleeping bag and other camping gear last year, I was still seeing my outdoorsy boyfriend. After he moved, I was worried I’d only use my stuff in case of a zombie apocalypse. So it was nice to realize that I have all sorts of Outdoor Types in my circle of friends–and to spend an outdoorsy weekend with them.

1. It’s the 165th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, the first gathering in the Western world. to discuss women’s rights. If you’re a feminist (dictionary defintion: “advocating social, political, legal, and economic rights for women equal to those of men,” so I hope we ALL are) and you get discouraged by the state of things, remember that 165 years isn’t that long for a whole lot of awesome change to have taken place (says the female, single, working, voting, homeowner who has had not children by choice and science and who is currently wearing pants).